Foreword by Michael Anderle
Foreword by Michael Anderle
He is the past, he is the future
10 PRINT "Hello, world!"
20 END
When I was in eighth grade (circa 1982 or so), I was taking a programming language class and just starting to understand how to communicate with these new machines our junior high had purchased.
And I was fascinated.
That fascination with technology has continued through today when I am (*cough, cough*) over fifty years old. I would go on to eventually obtain a job working with computers, then consulting using computers to fix business problems and finally, to run screaming from the industry when it looked like I would have to learn a new computer language every couple of years or so.
Finally, when I turned forty-seven, I would write a story about a woman who was changed through the use of alien molecular nanotechnology. I just called this technology “nanocytes” and went about discussing the characters, not giving too much thought to how and where this technology had been derived and who might have been involved with it way back then.
Life is stranger than fiction sometimes.
Back in the 80s, when I was learning about computers and coding in high school, Marc Stiegler was publishing works that discussed the future of communication through the key role of hypertext.
This publication predated the Internet, yet you see the building blocks of the Internet we know today in his work back when I was trying to figure out how to say "hello world."
Not long after I graduated from high school in 1989, Marc published a seminal short story (ANALOG SF magazine) titled The Gentle Seduction, where the story's characters are augmented with molecular nanotechnology.
Here is a clip from the Wikipedia article (links refer back to www.wikipedia.com):
The story's characters are augmented with molecular nanotechnology. The 'seducer' is the technology itself, and perhaps the programmers of the technology. He realized the majority of mankind is more willing to swallow a pill that fixes one's back (this happens in the story) than take a pill that installs a computer in one's forehead (also from the story). He also realized that many humans do not have the mental fortitude to survive the Technological singularity. The heroine of "The Gentle Seduction" is a normal woman whose very elemental connection with her own identity is key in soothing humanity's jarring experience of finally meeting an alien mind.
I was trying to figure out how to live in an apartment as a recent high school graduate. Marc was working on the future I would later enjoy and setting the foundation for a technology concept I would use in my first book series.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Marc was working on technology related to computer security, including inventing the principles underlying Polaris, which was to help secure Windows XP against viruses and trojans.
I was surprised to learn (from Wikipedia, not from Marc) about his engagement with the RSA information security conferences in 2012 and 2013.
I have begun to understand just how little we know of Marc's influence in our present that he supplied in our past.
The Brain Trust
Fast forward to the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century: my little bitty publishing company LMBPN had a chance to publish someone I knew had been part of the early science fiction scene. I made him a deal (I hoped) he wouldn't refuse.
And he didn't.
As I have watched Marc write on this seminal work over the last couple of years, I have enjoyed more than a couple of discussions with him about the characters and the foresight of the technologies he has introduced into this set of stories.
His stories are thought-driven, like all the best science fiction, and do not limit themselves to prognosticating the future of technology. Rather, they touch on the areas of technology, humanities, politics, global financial collapse and digital currency, and pandemics.
In fact, Book 5 was in editing when the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the world in early 2020.
I would rather he hadn't been so prescient on that issue.
I would argue that there is a bit of everything in this set of stories called The Brain Trust for you to dig deeper and find out more. If you are a futurist, this is like eating sugar for breakfast. Do you like characters who make you think? Here you go, dig right in.
In all of this, consider that we are still unraveling new technologies and directions in today's society that Marc Stiegler wrote about last century.
How many decades will it take to start proving what he suggests in The Brain Trust series is not only plausible but scarily accurate?
None of this has to be true now. But it might very well be in our future.
Michael Anderle
April 29, 2020
The Braintrust: A Harmony of Enemies
The Braintrust Book One
